Why do I fail?

Why on earth do I fail? It would, on the face of it, seem a very valid question. For, why on earth would anyone in his senses want to embrace failure? After all we are all working hard to succeed. And it is success that we want to embrace.

Let me try to explain.

It’s a common and widely held belief that we should stay focused on success and pursue success if we are to succeed. But what is the practical reality? We notch up a few successes and then buoyed up by these successes, strive even harder, to only find oneself landing hard in the ditch of failure. Broken bones and aching muscles allow self-doubts to surface, or worse still, pull us permanently down into a vortex of doubt and depression, leaving us permanently scarred. While you spend your time wondering what went wrong, there will be enough people around to seize the opportunity and berate you for all your shortcomings.

It would seem that something has seriously gone wrong.

What has actually gone wrong is very simple. While we ask youngsters to chase success, we don’t tell them about failure. The reality of life is that failure also has a very thriving presence and you will have to taste the bitter fruit of failure once in a while. The sad fact is that although despised and disowned, failure can actually be a great friend, providing us the valuable lessons that we need on the long and arduous way to success. Failure can guide and prod, telling you where you went wrong, showing you the way and pushing you further to make the crucial corrections and succeed the next time around.

If we do not understand that failure is the first halt on the way to success, we may throw the game away and lose it unnecessarily. Therefore it is very important to learn to accept failure, take it in our stride and learn the valuable lessons that failure carries for us. He who has learnt this difficult art is bound to taste success in large measure.

The difficulty in appreciating this simple fact is mainly because we discuss success and only success all the time. But if we look at any successful person’s life, we will find that he or she would have tasted failure on many occasions. Many of them have even talked or written about it.

Think about what a successful Winston Churchill meant when he said “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. “

The achievements of the basketball player, Michael Jordan are well-known. So what does he say about his string of successes? “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Which is why, let us embrace failure, so that all our efforts are finally crowned with success.